Still, I’m really excited for my colleague Andrew Lund, who is leading the conversation with Mr. Copps, as well as the many Hunter students and faculty who will be able to attend. Thus, I wanted to share a bit about what I’d like them (and the world) to know about this great public servant.

To fully appreciate how exceptional Copps was as an FCC Commissioner, a role he fulfilled from 2001 to 2011, you need to know how thoroughly the Commission has traditionally been a “captured” agency — that is, generally doing the bidding of the industries that it was constructed, in principle, to regulate.

You should also know how the “revolving door” of government works: After working in government in a position of any real importance, many former public servants often take plum jobs in the private sector where they can leverage their regulatory knowledge and even their interpersonal connections to the advantage of their new employers.

Once he started his term at the FCC, Commissioner Copps knew that, after his time in government, he could easily walk into a plum job in the private sector. After all, this had been the route taken by many of his predecessors — as well as many of his colleagues who stepped down in the interim.

Unfortunately, when looking at the decisions that many of these FCC folks who turned that experience into very-well-paid private sector jobs, one could be forgiven for wondering whether many of them truly had the public interest at heart. Some of their decisions suggest that they were, at least in part, also thinking about their long-term earning potential. I won’t name names, but all of us who follow communication law reasonably closely know the most obvious examples.

When looking at Commissioner Copps’ decisions, however, nobody could possibly doubt that his true allegiance really was with the public for the full decade of his service. Media reform groups like Free Press and Public Knowledge finally had an unabashed, reliable ally with his hand on the levers of power, on issues from broadcasting to telecommunications to pluralism and diversity.

The real sea change on ownership came in late 2002 and 2003, as then-Chair Michael Powell proposed a substantial roll-back in the rules against media consolidation. Copps and fellow Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein pushed to have substantial public discussion around the proposal, including multiple, well-publicized hearings. Powell said no — allowing just one hearing — so Copps and Adelstein went on tour, holding 13 unofficial hearings.

Through this and other efforts, working alongside public interest-minded NGOs, Copps helped bring major public attention to Powell’s proposal, ultimately bringing it to a halt. This slowed (though certainly did not stop) the process of media consolidation, through which ever fewer companies control ever more of our media landscape.

I would love to say a great deal more about Copps’ time at the FCC, but I’ll say just a few more words on one more issue: broadband regulation. He came in just in time to dissent from the FCC’s decisions to give away the keys to the kingdom on broadband interconnection, in the decision that led to the Brand X ruling by the Supreme Court.

The FCC ruled that broadband infrastructure companies — the folks who’ve used imminent domain and massive public subsidies as key tools as they’ve laid the cable, phone, or fiber lines over which broadband is transmitted — are not obligated to share their “last mile” systems with competitors. (This requirement for “interconnection” was already in place for landline local and long-distance telephone service, which led to an explosion of competition and plummeting prices.)

Again, though ownership and broadband policy are among his best-known issues, Copps was a tireless voice for the public interest on virtually every issue imaginable that came before the Commission. Even though he stepped down from the Commission over a year ago, he continues the work today.

Even as a former Commissioner who spent a decade being the thorniest thorn in the sides of those seeking to make a quick buck at the public’s expense, Mr. Copps could still quickly make a quick buck himself working for industry. There are a large number of companies, industry trade groups, and swanky D.C. law firms that would be quite happy to give him a huge salary, cushy office, and first class travel budget to speak on their behalf.

Instead, Copps has moved on to work for Common Cause, one of our nation’s strongest voices fighting for the best interests of ordinary people. This is just the latest in a long line of decisions in which he has chosen to fight for the public interest, even though it’s easier and more lucrative to fight for those who already have disproportionate money and influence.

For public interest advocates, Michael Copps was, at a minimum, the greatest FCC Commissioner since Nicholas Johnson retired nearly 40 years ago — and perhaps the greatest ever. His work at the Commission will be missed, but I look forward to seeing him continue to have a major role in pushing for a fairer, more just media system for many years to come.

One more point, for anybody who’s read this far: As of now, Copps’ Wikipedia page is a mere stump — the Wikipedia term for an article that is too short and needs to be expanded. In this case, a great deal more needs to be said in order to do its subject justice. I call on you to help me do this in the coming weeks. Mr. Copps was and remains a tireless and effective servant of the public, and this is but a small favor we can do in return.

We’re in trouble. The future of the internet is in danger, and if that danger comes to pass, it’s both unhealthy for and a very bad indicator of the health of our democracy.

Congress is already very close to passing companion bills to censor the internet, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, H.R. 3261) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA, S. 968). This is in addition to the domain name seizures already underway by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

All of these efforts are terrible ideas. Their supporters don’t understand or care about the internet and are happily willing to break the internet to appease the content industry. It is among the very worst contemporary examples of a government that is of, by, and for special interests, and if it passes, it will be a slap in the face of democracy, free expression, due process, and technological innovation. To top it all? It won’t even do much to stop online infringement.

Fortunately, there may be signs that things are turning our way. I’ll get to that further below.

EFF has a great summary of the several ways SOPA can lead to a site getting shut down. Section 102 deals with foreign sites and is the most all-encompassing, but 103 and 104 are actually easier for rights holders to (mis)use, and they apply to domestic as well as foreign sites, so I’ll start there.

Section 103 allows IP rights holders to go directly to a website’s payment processors and advertisers—and to demand that these third parties cease all business with the website operator. These payment processors and advertisers then have just five days to act. The website operator has the right to file a counter-notice that they are not substantially dedicated to infringement, but (a) they may not get the chance until after the payment processors and advertisers have already cut off payments, and (b) the third parties have no obligation to take the counter-notice as final and re-establish a business relationship.

Section 104 takes this “default=censorship” strategy even further. Everyone in the internet ecosystem—registrars, web hosts, advertisers, financial processors, search engines, etc. etc.—gets near-categorical federal and state immunity for any decision to terminate a business relationship with a site (or even to shutter a site) “in the reasonable belief” that the site is dedicated to infringement. Under Section 103, a rights holder must at least file a claim. Under Section 104, even the intimation that a site is infringing might be enough to get it shut down—and the site would have no legal recourse.

The Administration also gets in on the fun in Section 102, which gives the Attorney General the power to use government-mandated Domain Name System (DNS) filtering to stop Americans from accessing “foreign infringing sites.” A domain name, such as Google.com, is an easy-to-remember way to tell one’s computer to go to a specific numeric address (e.g., 74.125.39.147). It is this number (the IP address) that identifies that site’s server (the computer that hosts the website). Everyone enters the domain name into their browser’s internet address bar, but the numbers would take one to the same site. Click on the numbers above or paste them into your browser to see for yourself.

Under Section 102, if a site were found to be primarily dedicated to infringement, the government could “seize” the site’s domain name. More precisely, the domain name registrar—a company that keeps track of which domain names are attached to which servers—would, if US-based, be compelled to stop sending users to the correct server. All domestic ISPs would also be forbidden to take you to the right server (the number behind the name), and advertisers and banks would be forbidden from doing business with these companies.

If the government found a foreign site to be infringing under these bills, the government would try to make it disappear for US audiences.

If this bill becomes law, we will see the shuttering and/or financial starvation of thousands of websites—which are, of course, a form of speech and/or press. They would be silenced and/or starved based on either an affidavit by a rights holder, a mere suspicion by a business partner, or (at best!) a one-sided court hearing with a low burden of proof. Little wonder then that legal scholars from (my friend and) rising star Marvin Amorri to the legendary constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe (pdf) have concluded that the bills are unconstitutional threats to the First Amendment.

By now it should be clear that, if passed into law, SOPA or PIPA would have devastating consequences for innocent actors who are mistakenly identified. The web seizures undertaken by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), beginning in 2010, illustrate this peril all too well. Several websites have been taken down for posting media files that were authorized and even actively shared by the copyright holders or their representatives. Others have apparently been seized merely for linking to allegedly infringing content.

One in particular, DaJaz1.com, has become the cause célèbre of the anti-domain-seizures movement. It was one of a cluster of hip hop websites seized last year. Major voices from Vibe to Kanye to P. Diddy were actively promoting the sites, hardly a sign that they are dedicated to copyright infringement.

Last week, the feds finally gave up on DaJaz1. TechDirt (which has nearly gone all-SOPA, all-the-time) had the headline:

Imagine if the US government, with no notice or warning, raided a small but popular magazine’s offices over a Thanksgiving weekend, seized the company’s printing presses, and told the world that the magazine was a criminal enterprise with a giant banner on their building. Then imagine that it never arrested anyone, never let a trial happen, and filed everything about the case under seal, not even letting the magazine’s lawyers talk to the judge presiding over the case. And it continued to deny any due process at all for over a year, before finally just handing everything back to the magazine and pretending nothing happened. I expect most people would be outraged. I expect that nearly all of you would say that’s a classic case of prior restraint, a massive First Amendment violation, and exactly the kind of thing that does not, or should not, happen in the United States.

They go on to detail how DaJaz1’s owners were stonewalled, blockaded, and never allowed their day in court by the feds—for over a year—while the feds managed to arrange a court process during which all court proceedings (including several granting extensions that DaJaz1’s owners should have been able to contest) were secret and all the filings were sealed and not open to the site owners.

Once the details of the accusations came out, it turned out that the allegedly infringing songs were given directly to the blog by copyright holders’ agents in the hopes of promoting the music. The RIAA was the source of the original complaint, and one of the songs in question was not even released by an RIAA label.

Another operation using similar methods but for a different goal—seizing sites with child pornography—mistakenly took down 84,000 sites in one shot, resulting in each of those thousands of sites being down for 3 days. Even worse, each domain was redirected to an ICE notice that the website had been seized for trafficking in child pornography. Nearly all of those sites were not dedicated to child pornography, and to my knowledge, ICE never even apologized to them for the error.

Further, it takes little imagination to picture a devastating chill on legitimate sites that make fair uses of copyrighted content. If I run a news and commentary site, I may be less likely to include portions of copyrighted works, even if such inclusion is very likely fair use and crucially relevant to my discussion of the matters at hand.

In particular, media criticism sites would be in grave peril; how long after the bill’s passage would it be before partisan news outlets started using the new law to silence their critics? How long before FoxNews goes after Media Matters for America? Think that’s far fetched? Witness Righthaven’s efforts to sue bloggers for using even brief quotations. And what was on the list of threats they used to scare people into paying licensing fees? Domain seizure. Among other things, these bills would give a hunting license for those who would like to shutter the sites of upstarts, competitors, and critics.

At least these bills will stop piracy, right? Hardly.

Dedicated infringers will still find infringing sites—especially foreign sites that host infringing files with impunity. Remember, the feds are seizing the site name (e.g., Google.com) but not the number behind it (74.125.39.147). All you need is a small program to tell your computer to go to the right number—and, because the bill will forbid your ISP from getting you there, a proxy server in the middle. The same strategies have already proven successful for dissidents behind government firewalls, who still manage to upload and download forbidden information—despite far more active, on-the-fly, and resource-intensive censorship schemes.

You might think that at least payment processors and advertiser networks would be scared off of dealing with these sites. If it were that easy—if we could target the banks and advertisers that support internet scofflaws—then spam and other internet evils would have long since been wiped out.

The internet breeds decentralized innovation, and innovators will spring into action to help users circumvent ISP and search engine filters as well. This software will also be considered grounds for legal action—with the goal being to ban the tools, as the 1998 DMCA bans DRM-hacking devices. That’s worked so poorly that multiple free circumvention tools are available for most major DRM systems. There are so many DVD rippers that LifeHacker has a post comparing rippers to help you choose the best.

As if all of the above failures and offenses were not enough, these bills would harm our economy and reduce our competitiveness in the internet age. If SOPA were law when YouTube was getting started, the site probably would have been shuttered. The next YouTube will be much less likely to be born in the US if it can be kicked out of the legitimate portion of the web before it has really grown up. The EFF warns that sites like Etsy, Flickr, and Vimeo would be in danger.

Internet innovation is one of the few bright spots in the economy, and major internet firms have warned that this will increase the cost of regulatory compliance and decrease our competitiveness. Venture capitalists have also warned that SOPA would substantially decrease their willingness to invest in US technology start-ups. Union Square Ventures, just down the street here in NYC, even put this link saying the same thing on their homepage.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has placed a hold on PROTECT-IP, and he has even vowed to filibuster the bill should it come to the Senate floor. Because of this principled opposition and his long record of standing up for internet freedom, I made a donation to Sen. Wyden’s re-election campaign—even though my wife and I are watching every dollar as we save to buy our first home.

So these bills are terrrrrible, but they enjoy a lot of support in the House and Senate—30 cosponsors in the House, and a whopping 40 in the Senate. This post is derived from an email I sent to my Senators and Representative, and all three wrote back with disappointing notes to the effect of, “Yeah, but we gotta stop internet infringement.” Surely this is unrelated to the content industries having spent far, far more money on lobbying and campaign donations than their opponents on this issue.

Which brings us back to democracy.

In response to these bills, we have seen the swelling of a major internet movement—nearly the groundswell we saw around network neutrality in 2006. Opponents created a campaign declaring November 16—the day of a hearing in the House that was heavily stacked in favor of SOPA—as “American Censorship Day,” a campaign that went viral in a major way. Over 6,000 sites including Wikipedia, Creative Commons, Mozilla (including the default start page in Firefox), Reddit, TechDirt, and BoingBoing, directed traffic to a single action site, AmericanCensorship.org. At the time, the site said that it had generated over 1,000,000 emails and four calls per second to Congress. To date, AmericanCensorship.org has earned over 650,000 Facebook likes and 63,000 tweets.

If Wyden’s hold and the opposition can stop this fast-moving train(wreck), then perhaps democratic values and majority opinion can actually shape the future of the internet. Just maybe, a public outcry can stop a terrible idea backed by special interests.

If not, we may be in big trouble—and not just because the internet will be broken.

AT&T can use the extra towers to improve reception in very crowded metropolitan areas, but the decrease in competition and likely resulting increase in price is a big problem.

People who sell a product charge what the market will bear, but if the market isn’t fully competitive—if customers have few options to take their money elsewhere—then customers can’t punish high prices or poor service, and providers charge more for less.

The wireless market is already not competitive for two important reasons. First, providers lock in customers with a combination of contract law and technology. They claim contracts and handset locks are necessary to recoup the costs of subsidized handsets, but why don’t they all charge less for month-to-month service on unsubsidized handsets? (T-Mobile is still alone in offering such a discount.)

Second, the industry is already an oligopoly, with so few major competitors that they already have the power some power to charge inflated prices. The standard measure of an industry’s competitiveness is the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index, or HHI.

To calculate an HHI, you take the square of the percentage of each firm’s market share. A firm with 20% share adds 400 points (20 x 20) to the HHI. According to Department of Justice antitrust guidelines (which, unfortunately, the DoJ and FTC have stopped following), if the HHI is over 1,000, the market is moderately concentrated—that is, not fully competitive. If the HHI is over 1,800, the market is highly concentrated and thus non-competitive. If a market is already over 1,000, then any merger raising the HHI by 100 points or more is presumptively a problem for competition.

To see how bad things are already, and how much worse they would be after the proposed merger, we should calculate the HHI for the wireless industry, both before and after. First, here are the ComScore market shares for each carrier as of March 2010:

Table 1: Market Concentration in the Wireless Industry, March 2010

Carrier

Share, %

Share Percentage, Squared

Verizon

31.1%

967

AT&T

25.2%

635

Sprint

12.0%

144

T-Mobile

12.0%

144

Tracfone

5.1%

26

Totals

85.4%

1916

This is what a noncompetitive oligopoly market looks like. We already see this in a lot of important ways—suboptimal cell service, attrocious customer service, stubbornly high prices, and charges that are often exponentially larger than the marginal cost.

In a truly competitive wireless market, a customer would drop a provider who charges up to $20/month for something that’s actually nearly free to provide. Imagine if McDonalds sold hamburgers at their current prices but charged $0.20 for each french fry—or $20 for all the fries you can eat. Potatoes are cheap, so we’d be offended and take our money elsewhere, because the fast food market is highly competitive.

In mobile telephony, however, there almost is no “elsewhere” to take our money, especially if you need reliable nationwide coverage. The number of players is small enough, and customers are locked in enough, that there is little opportunity to punish this price gouging. (Thankfully, free messaging-over-data via services such as Google Voice allow customers some opportunity for arbitrage, but expensive data plans and technological know-how limit this opportunity to to the most economically and technologically well-positioned customers.)

So the bad news of an uncompetitive market is already here. Now, let’s see what the market might look like after an AT&T/T-Mobile merger. Here’s that table, assuming that all T-Mobile customers stay with AT&T (and most will have to for some time, thanks to their two year contracts):

A substantial number of T-Mobile customers will switch to Verizon or Sprint, but the HHI would still be in the mid-2000’s, and no scenario makes this market more competitive than today’s market. In short, customers and regulators should be worried.

Now imagine what happens when it’s specifically T-Mobile that goes away. They have long been the cheapest option, offering the worst service among the big four in exchange for much cheaper prices. They’re the only company that has experimented with discounted pricing for month-to-month customers. Inexplicably, they’re still the only major US carrier to deploy UMA, which allows voice calling over wifi. (I’d love to use my Verizon minutes to make and receive calls over my home wifi router; instead, I’m forced to take the chance that I’ll drop yet another call in my first-floor apartment. Can you hear me now?)

T-Mobile offers several unique features in the otherwise troublesome wireless market, and AT&T is unlikely to keep many if any of them. Ma Bell just wants the customers, towers, and spectrum. If they wanted to sport UMA or cheaper pricing, they could have offered them years ago.

The current cell market is already highly concentrated, so we get service that is overpriced, with limited features and a quality of service that does not justify what we pay. If federal regulators allow AT&T to buy T-Mobile—which, unfortunately, is practically a given—the market will be even less competitive.

This merger means less choice and still-higher prices for something like the service we’ve long since been promised. If you have a lot of stock in the telecom industry, however, it’s a big win.

Over at Public Knowledge, Robb Topolski has written an inspirational post, ISPs Behaving Badly, which criticizes Time Warner’s trial runs at tiered pricing.

I’m not opposed to tiered pricing in principle, though TW appears to have handled it rather badly, and it still fails to solve the root problem of weak competition in the wireline ISP market. Also, I’m skeptical that it’s necessary–rather than a way for TW to keep maintenance costs down and prices up in a market where consumers have few other options.

I really appreciate Topolski taking on the ever-invoked myth that the internet is about to become so choked up as to become unreliable. This is the threat that the “Internet Tubes” will get full, invoked by then-Senator, now-convict Ted Stevens was threatening all the way back in 2006.

Basically, this threat is still a bogeyman and looks to be so indefinitely. Last year, Telegeography concluded, “Internet traffic is growing fast, but capacity is keeping pace.”

For a more detached, scholarly view of internet traffic, see the Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies (MINTS) site. Chief investigator Andrew Odlyzko and company are doing great work here. He also suggests that, if anything, the rate of growth in wireline broadband traffic is decreasing. The most recent MINTS post cites a Cogent estimate of 30% growth in internet traffic in Q4 2008 versus 2007.

Last February, Odlyzko argued that, at least as far as the network industries are concerned internet growth may be too slow. This was even based on higher estimates of growth; Odlyzko’s estimate at the time was that internet traffic grows at about 50% per year.

If the cost of managing network traffic next year will be roughly 2/3 of this year’s per-bit price, and total traffic is around 3/2 of this year’s total, network providers spend about the same year-over-year for network maintenance (2/3 * 3/2 = 1) and thus make the same profit per subscriber.

Of course, it’s very un-sexy to tell your stockholders that per-subscriber profits will be the same as last year, especially considering the ever-decreasing potential for new subscribers in a broadband market that is approaching saturation.

Thus, dare I suggest: Maybe the exaflood threat is actually about broadband providers leveraging their way into a new business model–whether the Tony Soprano business model of “Charge Google,” or the wireless carriers’ model of tiered pricing.

To draw a comparison with the wireless industry is instructive; even when wireless data transmission is more than doubling every year, wireless carriers keep charging lower prices for better service and rolling out every more reasonably priced all-you-can-everything plans.

Where there’s even modest (and far from ideal) competition, customers come out far better than in the duopoly-at-best home broadband market.

But then again, maybe “global traffic will exceed the Internet’s capacity as soon as this year.” That is, if you listen to Phil Kerpen’s commentary at Forbes–from January 2007.

In a(nother) huge election day win, yesterday the FCC deregulated the “white spaces” between TV stations, allowing technology firms and enthusiasts the right to play around in these unused channels of high-quality spectrum.

In a 5-0 decision, the Commission issued a ruling allowing anybody to transmit messages in white spaces, within fairly limits on the generation of interference. By declaring the spectrum open to unlicensed experimentation, they’ve green-lighted the development of new technologies that some describe as “wifi on steroids.”

Unsurprisingly, Google is happy, and unless you’re invested in one of the incumbent industries on Wired’s list of losers (see first link), you should be, too.

P.S. On a personal note, it’s been a metric year since I blogged, and for good reason. Life is crazy now, not least because my wife Tina Collins just got a 2 year fellowship at (ahem) HARVARD! So as I finish up my dissertation (still expecting to wrap it up this summer), we’re gearing up to move (her and probably me) to Cambridge. While I’m still actively applying for tenure-track jobs across the country, I’m also looking at postdocs and other work around Boston.

This is an important telecom policy issue, and it would still be a problem if Verizon were blocking any messages due to their political content. Cell messaging is a truly common carriage service, and content-based discrimination is simply unacceptable.

The hearing was held at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. When Catherine Bracy, the Center’s administrative manager, opened the door to the hearing at 7:15 am, “none of the 35 to 40 people waiting to get in appeared to know what the hearing’s subject matter would be,” the AP reports. She also saw a couple of the ringers sleeping in the front row during the hearing.

Network Management is best left to the sound, good-faith judgment of the engineers and proprietors who run and own the networks and who are best able to remedy customer service issues promptly, rather than to regulation. The self-policing marketplace and blogosphere, combined with vigilant scrutiny from policymakers, provides an ample check on the reasonableness of such judgments.

There’s only one problem: whatever market pressure and public criticism can be leveled has already come to pass, and Comcast still has not changed direction. Could this have something to do with the market failure in the broadband market? After all, a duopoly is rarely the sign of a healthy market.

On DRM-related sidenote, somebody (presumably Comcast) put a password on the PDF, preventing the wholesale one-step copying of text. Yet further evidence that the company is deeply committed to an open dialogue on net neutrality.